Just before Chinese New Year I went to New York with my executive chef Joe Lee with one agenda: to try as many restaurants and specialties as possible in eight days. The idea was to check out latest food trends and look around for inspiration and ideas for my two restaurants, Gold and Striphouse. This is all part of the job for a chef. You have to know what’s going on in the food world. A lot of you probably think it must be great trying all these restaurants. But in reality it’s hard work. In fact, it became an ordeal.

Our first meal was lunch at Michael White’s Marea for his so-called “ode to Italian seafood”: slow-cooked octopus with smoked potato, sashimi hamachi, red wine-braised octopus with black olive and his famous home-made pasta and clams, and an amazing crispy red snapper.

That same night, César Ramirez’s chef’s tasting table at Brooklyn Fare was an ingenious 20-course small-plates extravaganza. There was sashimi, followed by a caviar dish with sour cream mousse, crispy quinoa, baked Japanese scallops, duck breast with radish, and braised veal cheek. Finally, there were several desserts, including a white chocolate block which was outstanding and really impressed me with its texture and taste. It literally dissolves in your mouth like air.

For breakfast the next morning, we went to a famous old deli called Katz’s for the best corned beef and pastrami on rye sandwich I’ve ever had, and for good measure their signature hot dog with sauerkraut and their specialty condiment, pickled green tomato. And that’s just the first 24 hours!

Over the next week it just went on and on, getting tougher and tougher. Among other highlights, lunch at Le Bernardin, which specialises in seafood, was a 10-course tasting menu. I don’t remember them all, probably because we started with a few too many bourbon cocktails, but there was a starter of yellow fin tuna carpaccio on foie gras toast, giant New Zealand scallops with sea-water foam, poached Brittany lobster with, believe it or not, goulash sauce, and slow-cooked sea bass with ginger red wine sauce. I won’t copy any dishes but I did discover a perfect match between goose liver and yellowfin tuna, which can adapted for my restaurants.

At Daniel Boulud's Daniel the tasting menu (below) included white fish cooked on cedar wood, wild game terrine with foie gras and main course of beef cooked three ways – braised, grilled and slow-cooked. Oh, and three or four desserts.

We also tried David Chang’s Momufuko, for slow-cooked pork belly steam buns, smoked chicken wings and slow-cooked egg with bonito flakes. The taste and texture of his famous buns was especially memorable. It is very tender and melts in your mouth without any fatty taste. It is completely different to char siu bao and Im sure people in Hong Kong would love it! In fact, it inspired an idea to open an outlet in Hong Kong called “Buns”!

With all this excess, I was fairly happy that I only put on 2.5 kgs in eight days. But that was only because I burned calories at 8am every morning, running for 40 minutes on a treadmill before starting to eat again. By the fifth day, though, I was suffering, and didn’t think I could take any more. And by the last day I had totally overdosed on food, bloated beyond redemption. I was beaten. For our last dinner, a 10-course degustation menu at famously obstreperous chef David Bouley’s Bouley, I only ate four courses. I just couldn’t handle it.

So when I got back to Hong Kong I went on a strict regime of eating lean and mean, going to the gym six days a week to burn off the weight I had put on. Like I said, it’s a tough business. Two weeks later I was fit for more and back on the road to Las Vegas…but that’s another story.